E-community Post: Joining the embedded conversation

A multimedia mashup of the latest in embedded computing.

iRobot medical telepresence ‘bot coming soon to a hospital near you

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When the doctor is out and patients are in, those who would rather see their doctor via a robot – rather than deal with an unfamiliar doctor – are in luck: The RP Vita medical telepresence robot, incarnated by iRobot and InTouch Health, can be controlled remotely when the doctor dials in from home, vacation, or … anywhere … using an iPad or laptop computer. The robot enables doctor-to-patient “face time” where the doctor can communicate with, monitor, and diagnose a patient remotely. RP Vita is suited up with a built-in stethoscope and also a phone for privacy, and portable ultrasound and myriad other medical devices can be plugged into the robot’s side. What makes the FDA class 2-certified RP Vita robot stand out, an InTouch representative says in the video, is its iRobot-provided navigation system. The navigation system enables far-off doctors (remotely) or nurses at a hospital (by pressing the robot’s torso computer display) to tell the robot which hospital room to go to. It then travels autonomously – and without running into any humans. It also self-identifies when its battery is getting low and returns autonomously to its self-docking power station.

Telehealth TechChannel

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Catch the latest updates on the telehealth arena at OpenSystems Media’s Telehealth TechChannel, which includes articles, Facebook and Twitter updates, videos, and links to on-demand events such as this one:

Building Intelligent Therapeutic Devices, presented by Wind River and Intel

Roving Reporter blog: Industrial platforms implement Intel ISF

By Warren Webb

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As the number of embedded devices in industrial applications skyrockets, designers are faced with a growing list of connectivity, manageability, and security problems. Each of these devices along with the central control hub must be able to share and react to streaming data as part of an overall plan to optimize productivity while minimizing support costs. For example, this real-time data can be used to identify production bottlenecks and enable remote diagnostics to predict maintenance needs. However, the biggest problem today in many industrial settings is poor interoperability among the individual devices and systems. Designers must spend untold hours analyzing and verifying connections and operation as new devices are added to a network. Addressing these problems, Intel announced the Intel Intelligent Systems Framework (Intel ISF) to simplify connecting, managing, and securing embedded devices and data in a standardized, reliable, and scalable manner. Read more: http://opsy.st/VFH76C

New app quickly detects parasitic, criminal behavior on Facebook

Stand back, malware and spam posts glued to Facebook users’ walls. A new (and free) app dubbed “MyPageKeeper” was recently developed and tested by graduate students and engineering professors at the University of California, Riverside, who say the app can flag down 97 percent of “socware” within Facebook. (“Socware” is “social malware,” i.e., the manifestation of any of the parasitic or criminal behavior that plagues online social networks.) During the four-month testing, the app incorrectly flagged posts at a rate of only 0.005 percent and took .0046 seconds on average for classifying each post, as compared to 1.9 seconds for a traditional website crawl.

The state-of-the-art features in today’s vehicles rely heavily on software that introduces the risk of code defects, software failures, and malicious attack. This paper provides automotive software developers with three strategies to address these challenges:

1. Build security in at the development stage via threat modeling and the use of defensive coding principles.

2. Address reliability early in the development process to reduce costs across the automotive supply chain.

3. Ensure compliance with required process and coding standards, including ISO-26262 and MISRA.